This chapter examines how the concept of free speech has evolved in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. It also assesses the impact of international standards on the development of Russia’s concept of freedom of speech. Along with the main legal documents, including constitutions and media laws as well as the judicial practice of the highest courts, Marxism-Leninism will be examined to help clarify Russia’s view of free speech. The chapter argues that, in Russia, the change in political regime has encouraged a reconsideration of the concept of freedom of speech by political leaders. It shows the similarities between Lenin’s ideas and the modern Russian concept of free speech. Also indicated is the impact of international standards on free speech as superficial and dependent on political will.

The rise of digital data in the new millennium has drastically changed former approaches of information management. New social media applications, cloud computing, and software-as-a-service applications further contributed to the data explosion. Big data governance is a part of a broader information governance program that manages policies relating to data optimization, privacy, and monetization. This information governance is the set of principles, policies and processes that corresponds to corporate strategy and define its operational and financial goals. The paper explains how big data governance determines what data is held, how it is held, where and in what quality. The authors describes the impact of Big Data, Big Data governance management , Big Data core disciplines and government policies related to big data.

The article is focused on the empirical research of using the Common Government Services Portal in South Russia Region. In the study we used such methods as the in-depth interviews, observation, and experiment. As a result of research, it became clear that many portal users do not realize its connection with the State, but classify it as a part of Internet environment. If the user realizes that the portal is a technological intermediary between the State and the citizen, the practice of using it varies considerably with respect to general Internet practices

The discourse of terrorism is one of the most powerful political discourses of our times. More often than not, its labels and assumptions – including the division of the world into sharp dichotomies of ‘free’ and ‘civilized’ states vs. ‘evil’ and ‘barbarian terrorists’–go unquestioned in related political speeches, media reports, and public deliberation. These unquestioned assumptions, however, become problematic when the signifier ‘terrorism’ is used to depict an armed struggle of ethno-nationalistic groups for independent self-governance. This is because struggle against ‘terrorism’ justifies a completely different arsenal of response strategies, which might lack legitimacy when countering separatism. This problem becomes apparent when states respond to separatism by manipulating the fear of terrorism to justify undemocratic actions in the name of national security. Using as a case study the post-Maidan confrontation in the East of Ukraine and analyzing related coverage by three political websites, this paper discusses how the discourse of terrorism has been formed within the public sphere of Ukraine.

The relevance of the study is conditioned by the objective necessity to form universal media advertising case of influence on the addressee. The aim of the study is to identify effective directions of influence of modern media in business and political advertising communication. As material of the research advertising media texts in business and political communication of the 21st century act. The methods of the study contain a comparative discourse and semantic analyses of contents and means of influence in business and political media advertising texts. The ways of analysis are useful for development of communication theory, linguapragmatics, psycho- and sociolinguistics, cultural linguistics, media, business and political linguistics, comparative linguistics. In the article, the most effective directions of influence in business and political advertising communication are considered. There are the main revealed directions of media advertising influence in business and political spheres on phonologic (orthoepic deformations, phonosemanticity), morphological (morphological deformations), lexical (semantic heterogeneity, alogism, lexical and phraseological contaminations and deformations), stylistic (stylistic deformations), syntactic (grammatical deformations and contaminations), psychological levels (psychological deformations, neuromental deformations).

Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of articulation, this paper analyzes Barack Obama’s and Vladimir Putin’s public speeches on the Ukrainian crisis of 2014. The article discusses how the presidents constructed rival discourses by erasing the nuances of complex tensions between the logics of equivalence and difference existing within the Ukrainian discursive space. Acting like imperial administrators from colonial times, Obama and Putin pushed representations of Ukraine based on two ‘impossible wholes’: a unified nation whose sovereignty was threatened from outside (Obama’s discourse) and a consolidated pro-Russian Southeast needing to be defended from Kyiv-based nationalists and extremists (Putin’s articulation).

To punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the United States and the European Union introduced a set of economic sanctions against Russian state companies and individuals closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The goal of this article is to look at the sanctions in relation to the process of the current consolidation of media assets and revenues in the hands of Russia’s biggest media empires, most of whom are close to the Kremlin. It questions whether the sanctions achieved the intended goal of undermining economic stability inside Russia or if, rather, they benefitted major state-aligned media corporations.The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the international sanctions have radically changed the structure of Russia’s media in a manner contrary to their intention. The sanctions unwittingly favored the biggest players to the detriment of the smaller, protecting state-aligned media and their financial incomes. In the climate of sanctions, media tycoons close to the Kremlin used their lobbying capacity in parliament to acquire advantages, primarily in terms of advertisement. Thus, smaller competitors were pushed out of the market and their shares were redistributed among a few major stakeholders.

This article aims to answer three questions concerning (1) the prevalence of the mismatch between student expectations and real university life, (2) factors influencing this mismatch, and (3) the effect of the expectation-reality mismatch on academic performance during the first year of study at university. The results of this study suggest that a large share of first-year students overestimate their future academic experience. However, this mismatch cannot be predicted by personal background characteristics and motivation at the beginning of study. According to the findings, three mismatch characteristics affect students’ academic outcomes: (1) a mismatch between expected and real grades, (2) a mismatch between expected and real levels of interest in studying, and (3) a mismatch between expected and real time for extracurricular activities at university.

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity.

This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

Area branding is singled out as a separate discipline in the educational programs of many Russian regional and Federal universities, but methodical recommendations on organization of the educational process, in particular the introduction of research and project work are not sufficiently developed. The article describes the successful experience of introducing project work as an important part of the discipline of «Area Branding», for example, the eponymous course which is part of the Master’s programme at national research university «Higher School of Economics».

The article provides a thematic plan of the discipline, consisting of lectures and seminars. The lecture part of the course includes a review of the existing models, methods, and experience of various projects in the field of territorial branding and marketing, based on the screening and subsequent discussion of visual and multimedia material. Within the framework of the seminars project research work is conducted: it is based on building a cloud of associations of the territory; the organization, methodology, tools of creation of that cloud are described in the article. The sequence of lectures and the corresponding project work are associated with the methodology and sequence of actions in the real process of development of an area brand.

The presented approach solves the problem of introducing elements of practical work; it is a necessary tool for training specialists in the field of branding, and has practical significance for the Russian market of intellectual services in general. The research results can be used by trainees and project participants for continuing work in the field of area branding, marketing, design, cultural research, as well as a starting point for further sociological research.

Nowadays in media industry crisis determines the search for new content models. Visualization becomes one of the media communication dominant, and defines new directions (e.g. visual journalism), formats (e.g. data journalism, virtual reality journalism). The author proposed for the first time the conceptual framework of the study of visual in a new direction - visual media studies, and the peculiarities of visualization of the newest media projects on the basis of big data and VR (virtual reality). The paper documented the transformation of features of journalism and media models in this paradigm, shows the parameters of new content strategies.

The article analyzes visual and graphic, constructive and structural features of the redesign of the brands, countries and cities of the world in the period from 2006 to 2016 years. On the basis of changes in the territorial brand identification describes the main approaches of representation of the territory by means of visual identity, as well as trends in graphic design as a global language of contemporary visual communication.

The article reveals actual indicators of the quality of life (QoL) in urban settlements of Russian regions. An overview of relevant - classical and recently published - sources is presented, in which the main theoretical components of QoL are analyzed in the perspective of their operationalization; basic concepts used in the measurement of QoL are given. On the basis of express-questioned qualitative data collected in the cities of Orel and Tula - regional centers of the Central Federal District with a standard of living slightly below the average and above the average in Russia, it is shown that when discussing QoL in a large Russian urban settlement, the following codes (topics) that are not became a common place in the literature on measurement of QOL: (1) assessment of QoL dynamics; (2) assessment of the presence / absence of spaces for civic engagement; (3) assessing the presence / absence of spaces for consumer behavior. The indicators of QoL were revealed, which practically all informants were initiativeally and independently of each other in the answers to the two questions about the quality of life in the city.

The article examines the concept of mediatized worlds, which has been developed within the framework of mediatization studies. The author comes to the conclusion that the so-called mediatization theory cannot as yet claim the status of a new paradigm within media studies, since it does not possess sufficient explanatory power. The notion of mediatization marks a specific field of investigation in interrelations between sociо-cultural transformations and transformations of mediatechnologies, rather than explains these interrelations. Nevertheless, mediatization theory has its own heuristic prospects, among other things, due to the emergence of the concept of mediatized worlds. According to this approach, processes of mediatization of culture and society should be studied on the level of particular “social worlds” and/or “small life-worlds” articulated through media communications. This will allow identifying, describing and explaining the manifestations of mediatization in various segments of social reality, based on the results of empirical research. A move in this direction is discernible in the author’s typology of mediatized worlds, which aims at raising methodological sensibility of mediatization research.

The article presents the results of the research carried out by the initiative group of the Russian Public Relations Association at the end of 2015. The research deals with various aspects of the perception of information by young people who were born in 1996-2000, such as: sources of information, value of information and communication, convenient formats for information, value of on-line and off-line communication, personal agenda, etc.